The scientific finding of the year has to be the reprogramming of adult somatic cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS cells). In reality the ground breaking work was published in 2006, however at that time it was not yet clear whether IPS cells were the real thing. In 2007 IPS cells were indeed shown…

The scientific life is an interesting one. You work like a dog and have little to show for it. Nothing works and you don’t have a clue why that is. Then one day you get that first result. You are happy, but a voice in the back of your head is telling you that this…

From Lawrence Krauss, in a discussion with Natalie Jeremijenko that is featured in the latest issue of Seed: I think that’s what makes science special. As a scientist and someone who tries, for better or worse, to extol the virtues of science in a society that doesn’t appreciate many of those virtues, I think that…

Reading in the NY Times about James Watson’s genome I stumbled on to this: Professor Church predicted that as the science of genetics advanced, fuzzy categories like race would become less important because genetic characteristics would point to factors like disease at an individual level. Meanwhile, he said: “There are still a lot of bigots…

Since the discovery of IPS Cells, the stem cell field has exploded. Here’s a few links on the latest developements. First, two cool papers came out recently. In the first from the Jaenisch lab, mouse IPS Cells were differentiated into erythrocytes and used to cure sickle celled anemia in a mouse model. This would be…

Last week I had a cool result – but this week after looking at all the controls it would seem like that amazing result is an artifact. Oh well … Instead of showing you that great result, I’ll post the remains of another cell that exploded after microinjection. Note that quite a bit of the…

This week’s mystery campus: hint: It swallowed the pill-designers (Lately it has been swallowing many RNA researchers). Since I’m about to leave for NYC for the weekend, I’ll confirm any correct answers next week.